There is a license which artists must grant under law, a compulsory license,... As with the GPL, anyone may accept. Anyone may decline. If you decline, you have no rights to perform the song...
This makes no sense to me at all. First you say that I must grant this compulsory license. Then you turn around and say I may decline the license. I can't find a way to read this that isn't self-contradictory. Do I have to grant the license, or can I decline (to grant) it?
And if I decide to decline it, what's the mechanism? Presumably I must do something that will notify all possible broadcasters and other "performers" (DJs?) that my recording can't be "performed". But I don't know any practical way to do such a thing. There's not even any way that I know to discover even a small percent of the people who might want to use my recording.
Wealth *is* zero sum. Wealth comes, ultimately, from the exploitation of natural resources,...
Nah; it's not even close to zero sum. Wealth may be based on natural resources, but exploiting resources requires labor, and that's something that is routinely created and destroyed. This is mostly because the idea of a "voluntary exchange" of labor is pretty much a myth. The two sides of such exchanges rarely (if ever) have equal negotiating power.
And some unmeasurable portion of labor is involuntary. One common English word for this is "slavery". It's hardly a secret that slavery is common in many parts of the world. Here in the US, we smugly congratulate ourselves on outlawing slavery around 140 years ago, but our courts still deal with it every year. We know that there are still slaves in the US; we just don't know whether they number in the hundreds or the hundreds of thousands.
It's easy to create a model of how control of labor can destroy wealth. Imagine a mini-economy consisting of just me and you, and we each produce 100 units of wealth per year. I decide to increase my wealth, and I do it by taking you as a slave. As a typical slave, you aren't happy, and by doing everything you can to interfere (without being punished too hard), you decrease your output to 20. I accept this, because I'm 20% wealthier than I was before. However, note that total wealth in our mini-economy has decreased by 40%, from 200 units to 120.
Another alternative, if our wealth is "static", is that I kill you and take your wealth. As long as the battle destroys less than 100 units of wealth, I am now wealthier than before (and you're dead). This isn't a hypothetical situation; it has happened repeatedly in human history. It's happening right now in Iraq, where the Bush Administration made the gamble that the cost to conquer that wealthy chunk of real estate would be less than the wealth of Iraq. But a lot of wealth, both the oil and the labor of people who are now dead, is being destroyed in the process.
The basic problem is that people don't try to maximize society's wealth. They try to maximize their own wealth. If this can be achieved by destroying part of others' wealth, then that's what people do. It's almost always in my short-term interest to take your wealth and add it to mine. The only way we've found to prevent that is via "government regulation" (e.g., laws against robbery and murder). But history shows that this doesn't work as well as we'd like.
The idea of an economy based on voluntary exchanges is a nice fantasy, but that's about all it really is. Actual economies run by humans don't work that way.
With limited budgets it only makes sense to look for life on Earth-like planets. We KNOW life can exist on an Earth-like planet. We don't know that life can exist on other types of worlds (however probable you might think it is). If we can only look at a small subset of known planets it only makes sense to bet on what we already know.
True, but note the strong interest in scientific circles when we finally landed a probe on Titan. Much of the interest was because Titan's atmosphere is in a temperature range consistent with liquid methane, and methane is the other main candidate for a liquid substrate for the complex chemical processes that life would require.
There has long been a conjecture that methane-based life is the main other kind that we can expect to find in the universe. Methane and water behave rather differently, and the biochemistry would be very different. But methane is a pretty good solvent, and should work at temperatures about 1/3 of what we find comfortable. The only place of any size in our solar system likely to have long-term liquid methane is Titan, so that was an obvious place to study. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have worked out. We'll probably eventually send more probes there to do more testing, but the data we got from the first try aren't encouraging. We didn't see anything at all like extensive forests, or even minor ground cover, so if there's life there, it's probably microscopic.
My favorite theory is from a story I read years ago, in which it turns out that Jesus has returned to Earth several times - and each time, the same thing happens. Finally, Jesus gets tired of being killed by humans, says "The hell with them all", and moves on to other planets where he discovers that his message is very welcome.
Now if I could just remember the name of that story...
In fact the 'peaking', when put into context, is somewhat vague, since throughout the whole visible spectrum from 400nm - 700nm you have well over 50% of the real watts that you get at the peak 470nm, so an adaptation to a particular wavelenght within it gives at most only a conservative if not marginal advantage.
An explanation I've read in a number of textbooks is based on this. The idea is that it's difficult to evolve (or design if you prefer;-) a chlorophyll-like molecule that absorbs sunlight across the entire wide "peak" of solar power. What chloroplasts and their cyanobacteria ancestors did instead was to develop a molecule that's fairly efficient at absorbing a narrow peak frequency. The rest of the cell has a collection of frequency-shifting molecules that absorb other frequencies and reradiate the photons at chlorophyll's preferred frequency.
Part of this explanation is the observation that a pure extract of chlorophyll isn't green; it's a sort of pale maroon. This is because chlorophyll absorbs the green, and scatters the red and purple photons. Chloroplasts are green because these frequency-shift molecules are absorbing across the visual spectrum and radiating the energy as green photons. Chlorophyll isn't totally efficient, so a lot of the green photons leak out.
This is a bit over-simplified, of course, especially considering that there are varieties of chlorophyll with different preferred frequencies. But it is based on the "problem" that solar output doesn't have a sharp peak. The "visual" part (400-700 nm) is pretty much a broad, flat peak, a bit brighter in the green part but with enough non-green to make it worthwhile to evolve a mechanism to absorb a wide range of photons.
I've also wondered if there isn't another trick that Ma Nature might yet stumble across: Add a narrow-band mirror to the chloroplast's membrane, to bounce back all those green photons that are lost now. This might also reflect incoming green photons, but this wouldn't matter if the internal green photons are captured at a high enough rate.
Why in the world would anyone with security concerns (and even the tiniest amount of sense;-) allow the use of Word or any other proprietary, binary format, in email?
A fun example: A couple of years ago, a fellow hereabouts told the local linux/unix user group a funny story of how Word docs got banned at his workplace. It seems that a VP had written some missive, and decided that it was so important that everyone in the company would want to read it. So he mailed it out to everyone. It was a Word doc, and the people with unix-type workstations mostly couldn't read it, so they did the obvious thing. They fed it to the strings(1) command. The result of this isn't pretty, since it loses all the (binary) formatting and font markup, but the text was readable.
However, strings can't decode the binary stuff, and didn't know to honor the "deleted" tags on big chunks of the file. It seems that among the deleted stuff was a list of the salaries of most of the management. Ooops!
The unix users got a bit of a chuckle out of this, of course, and the news got back to the VP (and other managers) what he'd mailed out. After the inevitable finger pointing settled down, the message got through the mangers' thick skulls that Word docs can and usually do contain "deleted" stuff that hasn't actually been removed or blanked out, and any time they send someone a Word doc, they might be sending them pieces of any other Word doc that has ever been on their computer. And it's not just unix users who can read this "deleted" stuff; a clever programmer could fairly easily make it visible on Microsoft systems, too. You could just port the strings command to Windows.
So the word came down that Word docs were strictly forbidden in email. Especially email sent outside the company.
This problem is not exactly secret. Any organization that allows Word docs, or any other proprietary binary format, in emails is inviting exactly this same sort of problem. Even if you don't understand it or believe it, chances are that some of your competitors do.
It's especially astonishing that the US State Department would allow Word docs to be emailed. Don't they have any competent security people at all?
(Or maybe they do, but they are intentionally ignoring the advice of such people. That does seem to be how the US government works these days.;-)
Which reminds me: I haven't been able to find any coherent description of the differences between the "desktop" and "server" editions. Now, most of the "server" machines that I deal with don't have a graphics card, and that seems to be the most common (though not universal) definition of "headless server". But does the "server edition" allow me to use the machine as a "workstation"? If not, what's missing from the server that's present in the desktop edition? And if I install the desktop edition on my machine that does have a graphics card, and I want to run assorted servers on it, what will I find missing in this distribution?
My home "desktop" machine is both a workstation and a server, and I don't find any clues that tell me which edition I should be running. What I'd prefer, of course, is a distro that has all the stuff, and a way that I can tell it what I want to install. This used to be the way that linux installations worked. Now there's this fuzzy, apparently undocumented desktop/server distinction, so I have a 50% chance of guessing the wrong one.
(Actually, I have a torrent running downloading the server edition. But I still suspect that there's only a 50% chance that I guessed right.;-)
[F]or three continuous dimensions, you can use no fewer than 3 real numbers to describe an arbitrary position.
Oh, nonsense. Anyone with the slightest understanding of real numbers can give you lots of ways to do it.
For an especially trivial one, write the 3 number in some base (I'll use decimal), pad them on either end with as many zeroes as you need to make them the same length (infinitely on the right if need be), and map the 3 digits in any position to 3 successive digits. Thus, (17.534, 7.5, 23.9937) maps to 102773.559309403007. The inverse mapping is left as an exercise for the reader. I'll also leave handling negatives to the reader, with a hint that this is done inside computers without the need for any special hardware symbol for '-'.
In fact, there are an infinite number of such mappings between a Euclidean 3-space and the real line. I just mentioned a simple one that most readers should understand. Most of such mappings aren't continuous, of course, but that wasn't a requirement for the task. If you want a continuous mapping from real numbers to a Cartesian 3-space, you will need to use at least 3 numbers per point.
I wish I understand what it is that convinces US born women to not become programmers.
It comes from growing up playing with Barbie dolls that tell them "Math is hard."
Now, this is obviously intended as a joke, but it's only semi-joking. There are all sorts of social forces in American (and many other) societies teaching girls that technical stuff is boring, difficult, and will make you a social outcast. After a couple of decades of a constant barrage of such propaganda, it's not at all surprising that most college-age women avoid technical subjects. At the college level, discrimination is no longer necessary, because only a small minority of women are still willing to tackle math, science or engineering studies.
What is actually impressive is the number of women who somehow resist all this social conditioning and tackle topics that "aren't appropriate" for someone like them. They're a minority, but there are a few million of them. This should give us hope for the future. We should be tracking down the social forces that try to turn girls into Barbie dolls, and work on countering their propaganda.
One problem is, no one will upgrade to IPv6 since there are few websites that use it, and since no one is upgrading to IPv6, few websites are inclined to provide it.
True, but I see another major problem at home. Our ISP (speakeasy) does provide IPc6. But I haven't yet learned how to make it useful. For that to happen, I need to find a way to make my IPv6 address reachable by clients. I have a number of domain names that work with IPv4, but I've been totally unable to learn how to make them work with IPv6. I have guest accounts on a couple of machines with IPv6, so I can do testing. So far, my home IPv6 address can't be reached from them, via either the (untypable;-) IPv6 address or any symbolic domain name that I know of. Maybe there's a way to do it, but so far I haven't stumbled across it, and nobody I've asked (even google) seems to know what I'm talking about.
The IPv4 network would be unusable without the domain-name system. IPv6 will remain an isolated pocket until its domain-name system interoperates with the IPv4 domain-name system. This means that people like me should be able to get a domain name that works with IPv6, and is reachable from IPv4 machines.
Now, maybe this is all workable now. Maybe I'm an ignorant idiot for not seeing its brilliance. But until they find a way to let ignorant idiots like me into the exclusive club, it's just not a workable upgrade path.
Actually, what I'd really like is a way to get a permanent address (v4 or v6) and domain name for my laptop, which is my "biggest" (in terms of memory and disk space) machine. It's running a live "test" version of several web sites that work from the other machines in our home LAN. It would be really useful if people could reach it from the Internet. But the instant I carry it past the range of my home wireless AP, it disappears from the Internet, and there's no string of characters I can give someone that will make it reachable wherever it happens to be. Solving this problem would make the Net into a much more powerful tool than it is now. I've read hints that the OLPC project is working on this, but I haven't found any usable details. Anyone know?
Some years back, I remember reading an interesting survey of attitudes and beliefs about the Internet. The fun result was that the overwhelming majority of the people classified as "top management" believed that Microsoft owned the Internet. OTOH, most of the grade-school kids answered "nobody" to that question.
... configurable, guaranteed upper bounds for the latency and/or lower bounds for the throughput, and not just on the packet level, but throughout the lifetime of a connection.
Actually, we've had RTP for over a decade, and it's widely used inside the major carriers. And this illustrates the weakness in the argument: It's true that IP doesn't do lots of things. But it was designed to have other protocols layers on top of IP, and they can do such things. From the start, IP has had other protocols (ICMP, UDP, TCP, SMTP) layered on top to implement things that "IP can't do".
The only real problem with the current Internet is the 32-bit IPv4 address, and we've also had a solution to that (IPv6) for over a decade. Well, OK, there's a second major problem: regulatory systems that allow the IP "carriers" to play monopoly games with the traffic and cripple their part of the Internet. But that's a political and legal problem that can't be solved technologically.... routers only know about IP and have no concept of connections, let alone required QoS properties of connections.
Oh, nonsense. Look inside just about any router, and you'll see lots of code that knows about connection-oriented protocols like TCP and RTP. Routers can and do implement various QoS schemes. There are a number of big companies that would love to sell you boxes that do such things. And if you can't find a router that implements exactly the stuff you want, buy yourself a linux or BSD box, install all the source code, and implement it yourself.
(Yes; I have done such things. And I've been paid by a few companies to do them. It's fun; everyone should try it.;-)
Yup, some "needs" are just impossible to meet with the Internet in its present state. Like the "need" for a single agency to monitor all Internet traffic. Or the "need" for some folks to control every physical traffic channel. Or the burning need of one familiar industry group to be able to decide unilaterally which computers are "trustworthy" enough to connect to the Web.
Actually, we've long had other networking protocols that satisfied all these "needs". In fact, pretty much every network ever invented has satisfied them, except for the Internet Protocol.
The reason that IP won was that it's the only one that scales up to the size we have now. If you implement any of those "needs", you restrict your network to a small subset that doesn't violate that "need".
Organizations tend to prefer nice, neat setups that are organized hierarchically and can be monitored and audited. This is very useful for a single organization. But it isn't workable for a universal system. That requires parallel, independent development of the parts. If there's a central authority with local veto power, the system can't grow past what that authority's management can understand.
With any sort of central controlling authority, you can't have the explosion of development that has happened on the Internet. This can only happen if people have a way of developing what they want on their own. We can see this pretty clearly by comparing it the cell-phone system, which has the potential to give everyone full access everywhere and make the Internet look puny in comparison. But it's blocked by being limited to only devices and apps that the cell-phone companies' management approve and permit.
For a "new, improved Internet" to succeed, it must make independent local development easier than the current Internet. If it has any sort of controlling central authority, it will just remain a niche player that can't be adopted by enough people and expand to replace the current Internet.
My point is that sometimes -- in fact often -- we believe things which are not true.
Indeed. And some of the game theory research has dealt with this. For example, in a number of the tests with humans or software, the testers would lie to the subjects about the actions of their opponents. In some cases, this altered slightly the rankings of strategies.
It's a fun topic to read about, and there's a lot to read about it.
Their consistent MO has been to spout brazen nonsense, then rely on the sheer effrontery to keep the truth hidden until it is covered in a pile of bullshit so deep it will never be brought to light. And the damned thing is that it worked -- a least for a while. Seriously, who has time to think about the truth behind the Iraq WMD lie?
Actually, if you go back to early 2003 and look at the propaganda leading up to the invasion of Iraq, you'll see that the Bush gang pretty much gave up on the WMD argument during the last month or so. The reason was that it had been so thoroughly debunked by so many people that they realized they needed a new pretext. They had pretty much run through all that were even remotely credible, so they pulled out their trump card: They had to stage a pre-emptive attack to prevent whatever Saddam's government might do in the future.
This pretty much stopped the attempts to debunk their arguments, because this one can't be debunked. Unless you are blind, deaf and quadraplegic, you could be planning an attack on anyone, no matter who you are or how peaceful you've been in the past. It's a challenge-proof excuse for attacking anyone anywhere anytime.
This is still remembered by a fair number of people in the world. It became clear that the people running the US government weren't joking when they used the phrase "sole remaining super-power". They did consider themselves in charge of the world, and they were prepared to attack anyone who challenged them. Or even people who didn't challenge them. They don't need evidence; all they need is to think that you might attack them.
A lot of us still remember this. And we remember that roughly half of the Americans who bothered to vote in 2004 voted to give these people four more years.
(The WMD concept does keep rearing its ugly head, of course. This is partly because of the discovery that, despite several more years of debunking, around half the voting American population still believes it. But it's also routinely used by American comedians, so it's not so good as a theme song any more. The real future is in worrying about what you and I might do in the future if we're not stopped now.)
Look, if massive deposits of oil were discovered in Darfur, you can bet that the US and everyone else would be over there to "liberate the people".
Um, try googling for "Darfur oil". Right now, the first couple of hits explain the situation pretty well. This is not news; the information has been around for anyone to learn about it. You can bet that the people in power around the world are thinking about this. If you dig into the online info, you'll eventually learn about what those people have been doing.
Maybe the problem is that the US government is currently too distracted by a disastrous intervention in another oil-rich area. When they have time, they'll probably work on pretexts for bringing Democracy to Darfur, too. Of course, by then they may find that they're facing people with a bit more clout than the poor folks in those Darfur villages.
So, perhaps we need an "electrum" rule: Start by treating people as you wish to be treated. When mistreated, respond in kind, but with restraint. Periodically try different levels of golden rule behavior and evaluate the results.
Actually, the game theory folks have done extensive tests of such strategies, and have written a lot on the subject. Their tests usually consist of collecting programs that implement various strategies, and pitting them against each other under the control of a "game master" program that then produces the appropriate statistics.
One of the favorite games has been variants of the "prisoner's dilemma", which you can google for. In a lot of tests, the overall winners have been the programs that implement the described algorithm. Or more simply: Cooperate with a stranger, remember the stranger's actions, and treat them the same way in the next encounter. Interestingly, the best strategy seems to be to have a short memory, forgiving transgressions after one friendly interaction or a long time without any interaction. It seems that the "players" that implement this sort of "tit-for-tat" strategy tend to form stable populations of winners at prisoner's-dilemma games, and players with different strategies tend not to win against these "nice guys with poor memories" players.
Various writers have pointed out that a lot of economic interactions have a prisoner's-dilemma aspect, in which cooperation pays off in the long term, but being a lone jerk pays off even more in the short term.
Of course, in politics we seem to have a lot of situations that are long-term stable disasters. This may be because politicians tend to do what the US government has done recently: Hit strangers with pre-emptive attacks. This has led to the results that we're all too familiar with, and these results may be long-term stable.
I have a business T1 link from AT&T..., but I'm under no illusions that AT&T won't still keep track of stuff.
Maybe they don't, but I have to assume that they do.
One of the bits of advice from very early in the history of the Net is: Forget about network-level security; the only way to prevent unknown others from copying and analyzing your traffic is to do end-to-end encryption. Even then, they can learn some things by analyzing your packet headers, which can't be encrypted. And, of course, the other end of any connection can keep a copy of anything you send them. You should assume that anything you send or receive has been copied by random unknown actors. The only security you have is making it difficult for them to decode the content.
In particular, ISPs, phone and cable companies, and other comm companies can and do store and analyze any data that passes along their lines. If you think otherwise, you're just naive. They are for-profit corporations, and if information about your traffic can be sold, they will do so regardless of any silly laws.
All of this has been understood from the earliest days of the Net. You can't run a network without doing at least some collection and analysis of the traffic. It's impossible to diagnose and fix problems without doing this. And when top management finally realize what the techies routinely do with the traffic, their eyes light up with dollar/pound/ruble/yen/etc signs.
"Flashmobs" -- groups rapidly mobilised by criminal gangs or terrorists groups.
Oh, man; talk about clueless. What "flashmob" really means is that the PR guy at a local commercial outlet has hired a viral ad guy, who spread the rumor that Britney or Paris or a member of the latest hot local indie band has been spotted at said outlet.
Of course, one could classify the ad agencies as criminal gangs or terrorist groups, and then maybe you'd have a point.
(I live in the Boston area, which recently had a fun example of advertising being mistaken for terrorism. So I'm not surprised to read nonsense like this. And I'm looking forward to further entertaining mistakes along this line. Anything to make the Homeland Security people look even more foolish.)
> > A five year old knows you can't take something that isn't yours...
> You don't need a law degree. Just ask a five year old.
Yeah, but most five year olds have also learned that you should share your toys with the other kids. If you have a fun toy, you don't hoard it and keep it somewhere that nobody else can have any fun with it.
The folks who "own" BeOS don't seem to have picked up on that kindergarten lesson, though.
It would appear, when combined, the topical pesticide combined with the resistant/genetically engineered plant proteins are weakening the honey bees immune systems.
Well, yeah; but that's really not related to the Climate Change issue in any significant way. If we were discussing, say, the success the religious folks have had in suppressing the teaching of evolutionary theory, the disappearing honeybees (and many other species) would be on topic. After all, it's ignorance of the evolutionary process that is leading people to do things such as over-use of pesticides that accelerates the evolution of resistance in short-lived species such as most agricultural pests.
But the topic here is climate change (and how much of this is due to human activity). So the plight of our honeybees really isn't on topic, interesting though it may be.
It is especially interesting that the bodies are nowhere to be found. So it's not a variant of the varroa mites, which leave behind lots of shrivelled bodies. It's probably not a micro-organism, either, though this is possible if the parasite's effect is to damage its host's navigation system. A larger predator is the most likely, but you'd think people would spot them hanging around the hives.
Well, we'll probably catch the culprit some time soon. Meanwhile, back to talking about the slow roast that we're doing to the planet...
We obviously still don't know exactly how everything works but when the current body of knowledge and the majority of the scientific community is predicting something severe, we would be stubborn to the point of idiocy to do anything but plan accordingly.
Actually, people are often stubborn to the point of idiocy, when their short-term profit is at risk. Historians have described a number of cases.
One is the historic destruction of many formerly-fertile farming areas by under-irrigation. People have understood since soon after the start of irrigation (at least 3000 years ago) that you have to over-water the land. The reason is that all water contains trace amounts of dissolved salt, and if you use only minimal water, that salt builds up in the soil, eventually making it too salty for most crops. You need a bit of extra water to flush out the salts. But in the short term, you get more crops if you spread the limited water over the maximal land area, using only as much water as needed to get a crop. There are histories of the destruction of several formerly-fertile areas this way. The people knew what they were doing, but they did it anyway.
Back in the 1960's and 70's, there was an interesting series of experiments in the arid lands of southwestern Asia: They built "goat-proof" fences (which is more difficult than you might imagine if you don't know goats;-) around random plots of land that were a few square km in size. They didn't do anything else; they just kept out the large grazers, especially goats which pull up the roots and eat them. They reported that in all cases, a year later the fenced lands were covered with a healthy layer of grasses, much more plant matter than needed to support the previous grazer population. They concluded that if we could remove all the domestic grazers from this large area for one year, there would no longer be the barren, rocky landscape that you see now. It would mostly be grassland. And if the number of grazing animals could then be kept to no more than twice the current population, the grasslands would be stable. This hasn't happened, of course.
Numerous other examples of such idiocy are documented. Readers might like to chime in with some that they've read about. (We probably shouldn't bother writing more about all the warnings of what was ahead for New Orleans if Congress didn't fund some major work on the levees; that has been documented to death.;-)
This does not give one any great hope that we will act rationally in the face of the growing climate change. We almost certainly have the knowledge already to get most of the world's climate under control. But this would cause loss of short-term profit for a lot of very powerful people, as well as minor inconvenience for a lot of the rest of us. So it ain't gonna happen.
Consider, there is currently a honey bee plague that is killing up to 90% of hive populations in N. America. How fucked up is that?
Actually, that's one thing that probably doesn't belong in the list. It's a disaster for beekeepers, and a major problem for some commercial crops that depend on honeybees. But the actual scientists (i.e., biologists) studying the phenomenon haven't generally considered it a disaster at all.
Honeybees are a domesticated species that is not native to North America. Like some of the other critters we introduced (English sparrows, starlings, carp, etc.), they partly escaped and went wild, and took over the niches that had belonged to hundreds of native species. They might not have done so well in the wild, except that humans maintained a large population that could replentish the supply as the natives evolved ways to fight them. But generally, honeybees have been a disaster for most native species of small pollinators.
Now that there are almost no wild honeybees left, the native bees and other small pollinators (that survived) have been expanding their populations. Biologists studying the phenomenon have generally treated this as a recovery of the original diversity that had been suppressed by the human-supported invader. The resulting diversity makes for a more stable ecosystem in general. And many of the native pollinators are doing a fairly good job of pollinating most of the crops. The main problem is that we can't control them as easily as we controlled honeybees. And most of them don't form huge colonies, so harvesting what honey they have isn't very practical.
The main "disaster" is the human one: We've lost much of our honey crop. But this isn't really a disaster for the ecosystem; it's just a minor local agricultural problem in one crop. And much of that problem can be attributed to something that biologists have generally warned about: It was a monoculture, depending totally on a single domesticated insect. Monocultures are inherently unstable, susceptible to crashes whenever a single parasite or disease shows up. It's not the first time we've seen crashes in a single monoculture crop, and it won't be the last.
If we want a reliable honey crop, we can't do it like we have been. We need a variety of bees, preferably of several species, so that a single disease or parasite can't wipe out the entire crop, and so that populations can be kept somewhat separate to impair the disease/parasite's rapid spread. But there's no sign that our agricultural system is learning that lesson.
There's no obvious tie-in of this with the climate change phenomenon. Nobody is suggesting that the honeybee die-off has anything to do with the warmer weather.
But the warming will allow the Africanized "killer" bees to expand farther into North America. They are good honey producers; maybe we need to learn to cultivate them. That's why people were experimenting with them South America, after all, when the big "Oops!!" happened and a bunch of them escaped.
Well, if this strategy weren't the most successful, then the long-term-thinking companies would win out in the end, no? Capitalism won't allow an inefficient system to survive in a competitive marketplace.
Actually, there's a simple "disproof of concept" available in the natural world, where people have often tried to make the same argument in favor of efficiency, only to be shot down by the copious evidence that the species that survive are very clearly not the most efficient ones.
Thus, a standard textbook example is that mice occupy a niche very similar to several salamander species. A mouse needs around 10 times the food supply as a similar-sized salamander, due to the energy cost of the mouse's constant high body temperature. But in most environments, mice are the evolutionary winners. Why? Well, when temperatures are low and the cold-blooded salamanders are too sluggish to move fast, the mice come burrowing through the snow and eat them.
The problem with the obvious (but fallacious) logic is that it doesn't much matter how efficient you are when facing a predator. If you don't have the quickly-available power to escape or fight off the predator, you die. It doesn't matter how effient you were; you become food for the competitor that can "waste" a burst of resources to kill you. As long as your body contains more energy than a predator needs to find and kill you, the predator has the evolutionary advantage.
This applies just as well to companies as it does to animals. Thus, a legal department is a huge, unproductive waste of resources. But if you don't "waste" your resources on it, your company dies a horrible death at the hands of the predators that can attack you with a flock of lawyers.
Survival depends on many things, and efficiency is only a part of the equation.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a license which artists must grant under law, a compulsory license, ... As with the GPL, anyone may accept. Anyone may decline. If you decline, you have no rights to perform the song ...
...
This makes no sense to me at all. First you say that I must grant this compulsory license. Then you turn around and say I may decline the license. I can't find a way to read this that isn't self-contradictory. Do I have to grant the license, or can I decline (to grant) it?
And if I decide to decline it, what's the mechanism? Presumably I must do something that will notify all possible broadcasters and other "performers" (DJs?) that my recording can't be "performed". But I don't know any practical way to do such a thing. There's not even any way that I know to discover even a small percent of the people who might want to use my recording.
It's all totally unclear and contradictory
Wealth *is* zero sum. Wealth comes, ultimately, from the exploitation of natural resources, ...
Nah; it's not even close to zero sum. Wealth may be based on natural resources, but exploiting resources requires labor, and that's something that is routinely created and destroyed. This is mostly because the idea of a "voluntary exchange" of labor is pretty much a myth. The two sides of such exchanges rarely (if ever) have equal negotiating power.
And some unmeasurable portion of labor is involuntary. One common English word for this is "slavery". It's hardly a secret that slavery is common in many parts of the world. Here in the US, we smugly congratulate ourselves on outlawing slavery around 140 years ago, but our courts still deal with it every year. We know that there are still slaves in the US; we just don't know whether they number in the hundreds or the hundreds of thousands.
It's easy to create a model of how control of labor can destroy wealth. Imagine a mini-economy consisting of just me and you, and we each produce 100 units of wealth per year. I decide to increase my wealth, and I do it by taking you as a slave. As a typical slave, you aren't happy, and by doing everything you can to interfere (without being punished too hard), you decrease your output to 20. I accept this, because I'm 20% wealthier than I was before. However, note that total wealth in our mini-economy has decreased by 40%, from 200 units to 120.
Another alternative, if our wealth is "static", is that I kill you and take your wealth. As long as the battle destroys less than 100 units of wealth, I am now wealthier than before (and you're dead). This isn't a hypothetical situation; it has happened repeatedly in human history. It's happening right now in Iraq, where the Bush Administration made the gamble that the cost to conquer that wealthy chunk of real estate would be less than the wealth of Iraq. But a lot of wealth, both the oil and the labor of people who are now dead, is being destroyed in the process.
The basic problem is that people don't try to maximize society's wealth. They try to maximize their own wealth. If this can be achieved by destroying part of others' wealth, then that's what people do. It's almost always in my short-term interest to take your wealth and add it to mine. The only way we've found to prevent that is via "government regulation" (e.g., laws against robbery and murder). But history shows that this doesn't work as well as we'd like.
The idea of an economy based on voluntary exchanges is a nice fantasy, but that's about all it really is. Actual economies run by humans don't work that way.
With limited budgets it only makes sense to look for life on Earth-like planets. We KNOW life can exist on an Earth-like planet. We don't know that life can exist on other types of worlds (however probable you might think it is). If we can only look at a small subset of known planets it only makes sense to bet on what we already know.
True, but note the strong interest in scientific circles when we finally landed a probe on Titan. Much of the interest was because Titan's atmosphere is in a temperature range consistent with liquid methane, and methane is the other main candidate for a liquid substrate for the complex chemical processes that life would require.
There has long been a conjecture that methane-based life is the main other kind that we can expect to find in the universe. Methane and water behave rather differently, and the biochemistry would be very different. But methane is a pretty good solvent, and should work at temperatures about 1/3 of what we find comfortable. The only place of any size in our solar system likely to have long-term liquid methane is Titan, so that was an obvious place to study. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have worked out. We'll probably eventually send more probes there to do more testing, but the data we got from the first try aren't encouraging. We didn't see anything at all like extensive forests, or even minor ground cover, so if there's life there, it's probably microscopic.
My favorite theory is from a story I read years ago, in which it turns out that Jesus has returned to Earth several times - and each time, the same thing happens. Finally, Jesus gets tired of being killed by humans, says "The hell with them all", and moves on to other planets where he discovers that his message is very welcome.
...
Now if I could just remember the name of that story
In fact the 'peaking', when put into context, is somewhat vague, since throughout the whole visible spectrum from 400nm - 700nm you have well over 50% of the real watts that you get at the peak 470nm, so an adaptation to a particular wavelenght within it gives at most only a conservative if not marginal advantage.
;-) a chlorophyll-like molecule that absorbs sunlight across the entire wide "peak" of solar power. What chloroplasts and their cyanobacteria ancestors did instead was to develop a molecule that's fairly efficient at absorbing a narrow peak frequency. The rest of the cell has a collection of frequency-shifting molecules that absorb other frequencies and reradiate the photons at chlorophyll's preferred frequency.
An explanation I've read in a number of textbooks is based on this. The idea is that it's difficult to evolve (or design if you prefer
Part of this explanation is the observation that a pure extract of chlorophyll isn't green; it's a sort of pale maroon. This is because chlorophyll absorbs the green, and scatters the red and purple photons. Chloroplasts are green because these frequency-shift molecules are absorbing across the visual spectrum and radiating the energy as green photons. Chlorophyll isn't totally efficient, so a lot of the green photons leak out.
This is a bit over-simplified, of course, especially considering that there are varieties of chlorophyll with different preferred frequencies. But it is based on the "problem" that solar output doesn't have a sharp peak. The "visual" part (400-700 nm) is pretty much a broad, flat peak, a bit brighter in the green part but with enough non-green to make it worthwhile to evolve a mechanism to absorb a wide range of photons.
I've also wondered if there isn't another trick that Ma Nature might yet stumble across: Add a narrow-band mirror to the chloroplast's membrane, to bounce back all those green photons that are lost now. This might also reflect incoming green photons, but this wouldn't matter if the internal green photons are captured at a high enough rate.
Why in the world would anyone with security concerns (and even the tiniest amount of sense ;-) allow the use of Word or any other proprietary, binary format, in email?
;-)
A fun example: A couple of years ago, a fellow hereabouts told the local linux/unix user group a funny story of how Word docs got banned at his workplace. It seems that a VP had written some missive, and decided that it was so important that everyone in the company would want to read it. So he mailed it out to everyone. It was a Word doc, and the people with unix-type workstations mostly couldn't read it, so they did the obvious thing. They fed it to the strings(1) command. The result of this isn't pretty, since it loses all the (binary) formatting and font markup, but the text was readable.
However, strings can't decode the binary stuff, and didn't know to honor the "deleted" tags on big chunks of the file. It seems that among the deleted stuff was a list of the salaries of most of the management. Ooops!
The unix users got a bit of a chuckle out of this, of course, and the news got back to the VP (and other managers) what he'd mailed out. After the inevitable finger pointing settled down, the message got through the mangers' thick skulls that Word docs can and usually do contain "deleted" stuff that hasn't actually been removed or blanked out, and any time they send someone a Word doc, they might be sending them pieces of any other Word doc that has ever been on their computer. And it's not just unix users who can read this "deleted" stuff; a clever programmer could fairly easily make it visible on Microsoft systems, too. You could just port the strings command to Windows.
So the word came down that Word docs were strictly forbidden in email. Especially email sent outside the company.
This problem is not exactly secret. Any organization that allows Word docs, or any other proprietary binary format, in emails is inviting exactly this same sort of problem. Even if you don't understand it or believe it, chances are that some of your competitors do.
It's especially astonishing that the US State Department would allow Word docs to be emailed. Don't they have any competent security people at all?
(Or maybe they do, but they are intentionally ignoring the advice of such people. That does seem to be how the US government works these days.
If you're upgrading a headless server, ...
;-)
Which reminds me: I haven't been able to find any coherent description of the differences between the "desktop" and "server" editions. Now, most of the "server" machines that I deal with don't have a graphics card, and that seems to be the most common (though not universal) definition of "headless server". But does the "server edition" allow me to use the machine as a "workstation"? If not, what's missing from the server that's present in the desktop edition? And if I install the desktop edition on my machine that does have a graphics card, and I want to run assorted servers on it, what will I find missing in this distribution?
My home "desktop" machine is both a workstation and a server, and I don't find any clues that tell me which edition I should be running. What I'd prefer, of course, is a distro that has all the stuff, and a way that I can tell it what I want to install. This used to be the way that linux installations worked. Now there's this fuzzy, apparently undocumented desktop/server distinction, so I have a 50% chance of guessing the wrong one.
(Actually, I have a torrent running downloading the server edition. But I still suspect that there's only a 50% chance that I guessed right.
[F]or three continuous dimensions, you can use no fewer than 3 real numbers to describe an arbitrary position.
... ;-)
Oh, nonsense. Anyone with the slightest understanding of real numbers can give you lots of ways to do it.
For an especially trivial one, write the 3 number in some base (I'll use decimal), pad them on either end with as many zeroes as you need to make them the same length (infinitely on the right if need be), and map the 3 digits in any position to 3 successive digits. Thus, (17.534, 7.5, 23.9937) maps to 102773.559309403007. The inverse mapping is left as an exercise for the reader. I'll also leave handling negatives to the reader, with a hint that this is done inside computers without the need for any special hardware symbol for '-'.
In fact, there are an infinite number of such mappings between a Euclidean 3-space and the real line. I just mentioned a simple one that most readers should understand. Most of such mappings aren't continuous, of course, but that wasn't a requirement for the task. If you want a continuous mapping from real numbers to a Cartesian 3-space, you will need to use at least 3 numbers per point.
(Yeah, I know: Picky, picky
I wish I understand what it is that convinces US born women to not become programmers.
It comes from growing up playing with Barbie dolls that tell them "Math is hard."
Now, this is obviously intended as a joke, but it's only semi-joking. There are all sorts of social forces in American (and many other) societies teaching girls that technical stuff is boring, difficult, and will make you a social outcast. After a couple of decades of a constant barrage of such propaganda, it's not at all surprising that most college-age women avoid technical subjects. At the college level, discrimination is no longer necessary, because only a small minority of women are still willing to tackle math, science or engineering studies.
What is actually impressive is the number of women who somehow resist all this social conditioning and tackle topics that "aren't appropriate" for someone like them. They're a minority, but there are a few million of them. This should give us hope for the future. We should be tracking down the social forces that try to turn girls into Barbie dolls, and work on countering their propaganda.
One problem is, no one will upgrade to IPv6 since there are few websites that use it, and since no one is upgrading to IPv6, few websites are inclined to provide it.
True, but I see another major problem at home. Our ISP (speakeasy) does provide IPc6. But I haven't yet learned how to make it useful. For that to happen, I need to find a way to make my IPv6 address reachable by clients. I have a number of domain names that work with IPv4, but I've been totally unable to learn how to make them work with IPv6. I have guest accounts on a couple of machines with IPv6, so I can do testing. So far, my home IPv6 address can't be reached from them, via either the (untypable;-) IPv6 address or any symbolic domain name that I know of. Maybe there's a way to do it, but so far I haven't stumbled across it, and nobody I've asked (even google) seems to know what I'm talking about.
The IPv4 network would be unusable without the domain-name system. IPv6 will remain an isolated pocket until its domain-name system interoperates with the IPv4 domain-name system. This means that people like me should be able to get a domain name that works with IPv6, and is reachable from IPv4 machines.
Now, maybe this is all workable now. Maybe I'm an ignorant idiot for not seeing its brilliance. But until they find a way to let ignorant idiots like me into the exclusive club, it's just not a workable upgrade path.
Actually, what I'd really like is a way to get a permanent address (v4 or v6) and domain name for my laptop, which is my "biggest" (in terms of memory and disk space) machine. It's running a live "test" version of several web sites that work from the other machines in our home LAN. It would be really useful if people could reach it from the Internet. But the instant I carry it past the range of my home wireless AP, it disappears from the Internet, and there's no string of characters I can give someone that will make it reachable wherever it happens to be. Solving this problem would make the Net into a much more powerful tool than it is now. I've read hints that the OLPC project is working on this, but I haven't found any usable details. Anyone know?
Who owns [the Internet] now?
...
Some years back, I remember reading an interesting survey of attitudes and beliefs about the Internet. The fun result was that the overwhelming majority of the people classified as "top management" believed that Microsoft owned the Internet. OTOH, most of the grade-school kids answered "nobody" to that question.
Now if I could remember who did that survey
... configurable, guaranteed upper bounds for the latency and/or lower bounds for the throughput, and not just on the packet level, but throughout the lifetime of a connection.
... routers only know about IP and have no concept of connections, let alone required QoS properties of connections.
;-)
Actually, we've had RTP for over a decade, and it's widely used inside the major carriers. And this illustrates the weakness in the argument: It's true that IP doesn't do lots of things. But it was designed to have other protocols layers on top of IP, and they can do such things. From the start, IP has had other protocols (ICMP, UDP, TCP, SMTP) layered on top to implement things that "IP can't do".
The only real problem with the current Internet is the 32-bit IPv4 address, and we've also had a solution to that (IPv6) for over a decade. Well, OK, there's a second major problem: regulatory systems that allow the IP "carriers" to play monopoly games with the traffic and cripple their part of the Internet. But that's a political and legal problem that can't be solved technologically.
Oh, nonsense. Look inside just about any router, and you'll see lots of code that knows about connection-oriented protocols like TCP and RTP. Routers can and do implement various QoS schemes. There are a number of big companies that would love to sell you boxes that do such things. And if you can't find a router that implements exactly the stuff you want, buy yourself a linux or BSD box, install all the source code, and implement it yourself.
(Yes; I have done such things. And I've been paid by a few companies to do them. It's fun; everyone should try it.
Yup, some "needs" are just impossible to meet with the Internet in its present state. Like the "need" for a single agency to monitor all Internet traffic. Or the "need" for some folks to control every physical traffic channel. Or the burning need of one familiar industry group to be able to decide unilaterally which computers are "trustworthy" enough to connect to the Web.
Actually, we've long had other networking protocols that satisfied all these "needs". In fact, pretty much every network ever invented has satisfied them, except for the Internet Protocol.
The reason that IP won was that it's the only one that scales up to the size we have now. If you implement any of those "needs", you restrict your network to a small subset that doesn't violate that "need".
Organizations tend to prefer nice, neat setups that are organized hierarchically and can be monitored and audited. This is very useful for a single organization. But it isn't workable for a universal system. That requires parallel, independent development of the parts. If there's a central authority with local veto power, the system can't grow past what that authority's management can understand.
With any sort of central controlling authority, you can't have the explosion of development that has happened on the Internet. This can only happen if people have a way of developing what they want on their own. We can see this pretty clearly by comparing it the cell-phone system, which has the potential to give everyone full access everywhere and make the Internet look puny in comparison. But it's blocked by being limited to only devices and apps that the cell-phone companies' management approve and permit.
For a "new, improved Internet" to succeed, it must make independent local development easier than the current Internet. If it has any sort of controlling central authority, it will just remain a niche player that can't be adopted by enough people and expand to replace the current Internet.
My point is that sometimes -- in fact often -- we believe things which are not true.
Indeed. And some of the game theory research has dealt with this. For example, in a number of the tests with humans or software, the testers would lie to the subjects about the actions of their opponents. In some cases, this altered slightly the rankings of strategies.
It's a fun topic to read about, and there's a lot to read about it.
Their consistent MO has been to spout brazen nonsense, then rely on the sheer effrontery to keep the truth hidden until it is covered in a pile of bullshit so deep it will never be brought to light. And the damned thing is that it worked -- a least for a while. Seriously, who has time to think about the truth behind the Iraq WMD lie?
Actually, if you go back to early 2003 and look at the propaganda leading up to the invasion of Iraq, you'll see that the Bush gang pretty much gave up on the WMD argument during the last month or so. The reason was that it had been so thoroughly debunked by so many people that they realized they needed a new pretext. They had pretty much run through all that were even remotely credible, so they pulled out their trump card: They had to stage a pre-emptive attack to prevent whatever Saddam's government might do in the future.
This pretty much stopped the attempts to debunk their arguments, because this one can't be debunked. Unless you are blind, deaf and quadraplegic, you could be planning an attack on anyone, no matter who you are or how peaceful you've been in the past. It's a challenge-proof excuse for attacking anyone anywhere anytime.
This is still remembered by a fair number of people in the world. It became clear that the people running the US government weren't joking when they used the phrase "sole remaining super-power". They did consider themselves in charge of the world, and they were prepared to attack anyone who challenged them. Or even people who didn't challenge them. They don't need evidence; all they need is to think that you might attack them.
A lot of us still remember this. And we remember that roughly half of the Americans who bothered to vote in 2004 voted to give these people four more years.
(The WMD concept does keep rearing its ugly head, of course. This is partly because of the discovery that, despite several more years of debunking, around half the voting American population still believes it. But it's also routinely used by American comedians, so it's not so good as a theme song any more. The real future is in worrying about what you and I might do in the future if we're not stopped now.)
Look, if massive deposits of oil were discovered in Darfur, you can bet that the US and everyone else would be over there to "liberate the people".
Um, try googling for "Darfur oil". Right now, the first couple of hits explain the situation pretty well. This is not news; the information has been around for anyone to learn about it. You can bet that the people in power around the world are thinking about this. If you dig into the online info, you'll eventually learn about what those people have been doing.
Maybe the problem is that the US government is currently too distracted by a disastrous intervention in another oil-rich area. When they have time, they'll probably work on pretexts for bringing Democracy to Darfur, too. Of course, by then they may find that they're facing people with a bit more clout than the poor folks in those Darfur villages.
So, perhaps we need an "electrum" rule: Start by treating people as you wish to be treated. When mistreated, respond in kind, but with restraint. Periodically try different levels of golden rule behavior and evaluate the results.
Actually, the game theory folks have done extensive tests of such strategies, and have written a lot on the subject. Their tests usually consist of collecting programs that implement various strategies, and pitting them against each other under the control of a "game master" program that then produces the appropriate statistics.
One of the favorite games has been variants of the "prisoner's dilemma", which you can google for. In a lot of tests, the overall winners have been the programs that implement the described algorithm. Or more simply: Cooperate with a stranger, remember the stranger's actions, and treat them the same way in the next encounter. Interestingly, the best strategy seems to be to have a short memory, forgiving transgressions after one friendly interaction or a long time without any interaction. It seems that the "players" that implement this sort of "tit-for-tat" strategy tend to form stable populations of winners at prisoner's-dilemma games, and players with different strategies tend not to win against these "nice guys with poor memories" players.
Various writers have pointed out that a lot of economic interactions have a prisoner's-dilemma aspect, in which cooperation pays off in the long term, but being a lone jerk pays off even more in the short term.
Of course, in politics we seem to have a lot of situations that are long-term stable disasters. This may be because politicians tend to do what the US government has done recently: Hit strangers with pre-emptive attacks. This has led to the results that we're all too familiar with, and these results may be long-term stable.
I have a business T1 link from AT&T ..., but I'm under no illusions that AT&T won't still keep track of stuff.
Maybe they don't, but I have to assume that they do.
One of the bits of advice from very early in the history of the Net is: Forget about network-level security; the only way to prevent unknown others from copying and analyzing your traffic is to do end-to-end encryption. Even then, they can learn some things by analyzing your packet headers, which can't be encrypted. And, of course, the other end of any connection can keep a copy of anything you send them. You should assume that anything you send or receive has been copied by random unknown actors. The only security you have is making it difficult for them to decode the content.
In particular, ISPs, phone and cable companies, and other comm companies can and do store and analyze any data that passes along their lines. If you think otherwise, you're just naive. They are for-profit corporations, and if information about your traffic can be sold, they will do so regardless of any silly laws.
All of this has been understood from the earliest days of the Net. You can't run a network without doing at least some collection and analysis of the traffic. It's impossible to diagnose and fix problems without doing this. And when top management finally realize what the techies routinely do with the traffic, their eyes light up with dollar/pound/ruble/yen/etc signs.
"Flashmobs" -- groups rapidly mobilised by criminal gangs or terrorists groups.
Oh, man; talk about clueless. What "flashmob" really means is that the PR guy at a local commercial outlet has hired a viral ad guy, who spread the rumor that Britney or Paris or a member of the latest hot local indie band has been spotted at said outlet.
Of course, one could classify the ad agencies as criminal gangs or terrorist groups, and then maybe you'd have a point.
(I live in the Boston area, which recently had a fun example of advertising being mistaken for terrorism. So I'm not surprised to read nonsense like this. And I'm looking forward to further entertaining mistakes along this line. Anything to make the Homeland Security people look even more foolish.)
> > A five year old knows you can't take something that isn't yours...
> You don't need a law degree. Just ask a five year old.
Yeah, but most five year olds have also learned that you should share your toys with the other kids. If you have a fun toy, you don't hoard it and keep it somewhere that nobody else can have any fun with it.
The folks who "own" BeOS don't seem to have picked up on that kindergarten lesson, though.
It would appear, when combined, the topical pesticide combined with the resistant/genetically engineered plant proteins are weakening the honey bees immune systems.
...
Well, yeah; but that's really not related to the Climate Change issue in any significant way. If we were discussing, say, the success the religious folks have had in suppressing the teaching of evolutionary theory, the disappearing honeybees (and many other species) would be on topic. After all, it's ignorance of the evolutionary process that is leading people to do things such as over-use of pesticides that accelerates the evolution of resistance in short-lived species such as most agricultural pests.
But the topic here is climate change (and how much of this is due to human activity). So the plight of our honeybees really isn't on topic, interesting though it may be.
It is especially interesting that the bodies are nowhere to be found. So it's not a variant of the varroa mites, which leave behind lots of shrivelled bodies. It's probably not a micro-organism, either, though this is possible if the parasite's effect is to damage its host's navigation system. A larger predator is the most likely, but you'd think people would spot them hanging around the hives.
Well, we'll probably catch the culprit some time soon. Meanwhile, back to talking about the slow roast that we're doing to the planet
We obviously still don't know exactly how everything works but when the current body of knowledge and the majority of the scientific community is predicting something severe, we would be stubborn to the point of idiocy to do anything but plan accordingly.
;-) around random plots of land that were a few square km in size. They didn't do anything else; they just kept out the large grazers, especially goats which pull up the roots and eat them. They reported that in all cases, a year later the fenced lands were covered with a healthy layer of grasses, much more plant matter than needed to support the previous grazer population. They concluded that if we could remove all the domestic grazers from this large area for one year, there would no longer be the barren, rocky landscape that you see now. It would mostly be grassland. And if the number of grazing animals could then be kept to no more than twice the current population, the grasslands would be stable. This hasn't happened, of course.
;-)
Actually, people are often stubborn to the point of idiocy, when their short-term profit is at risk. Historians have described a number of cases.
One is the historic destruction of many formerly-fertile farming areas by under-irrigation. People have understood since soon after the start of irrigation (at least 3000 years ago) that you have to over-water the land. The reason is that all water contains trace amounts of dissolved salt, and if you use only minimal water, that salt builds up in the soil, eventually making it too salty for most crops. You need a bit of extra water to flush out the salts. But in the short term, you get more crops if you spread the limited water over the maximal land area, using only as much water as needed to get a crop. There are histories of the destruction of several formerly-fertile areas this way. The people knew what they were doing, but they did it anyway.
Back in the 1960's and 70's, there was an interesting series of experiments in the arid lands of southwestern Asia: They built "goat-proof" fences (which is more difficult than you might imagine if you don't know goats
Numerous other examples of such idiocy are documented. Readers might like to chime in with some that they've read about. (We probably shouldn't bother writing more about all the warnings of what was ahead for New Orleans if Congress didn't fund some major work on the levees; that has been documented to death.
This does not give one any great hope that we will act rationally in the face of the growing climate change. We almost certainly have the knowledge already to get most of the world's climate under control. But this would cause loss of short-term profit for a lot of very powerful people, as well as minor inconvenience for a lot of the rest of us. So it ain't gonna happen.
Consider, there is currently a honey bee plague that is killing up to 90% of hive populations in N. America. How fucked up is that?
Actually, that's one thing that probably doesn't belong in the list. It's a disaster for beekeepers, and a major problem for some commercial crops that depend on honeybees. But the actual scientists (i.e., biologists) studying the phenomenon haven't generally considered it a disaster at all.
Honeybees are a domesticated species that is not native to North America. Like some of the other critters we introduced (English sparrows, starlings, carp, etc.), they partly escaped and went wild, and took over the niches that had belonged to hundreds of native species. They might not have done so well in the wild, except that humans maintained a large population that could replentish the supply as the natives evolved ways to fight them. But generally, honeybees have been a disaster for most native species of small pollinators.
Now that there are almost no wild honeybees left, the native bees and other small pollinators (that survived) have been expanding their populations. Biologists studying the phenomenon have generally treated this as a recovery of the original diversity that had been suppressed by the human-supported invader. The resulting diversity makes for a more stable ecosystem in general. And many of the native pollinators are doing a fairly good job of pollinating most of the crops. The main problem is that we can't control them as easily as we controlled honeybees. And most of them don't form huge colonies, so harvesting what honey they have isn't very practical.
The main "disaster" is the human one: We've lost much of our honey crop. But this isn't really a disaster for the ecosystem; it's just a minor local agricultural problem in one crop. And much of that problem can be attributed to something that biologists have generally warned about: It was a monoculture, depending totally on a single domesticated insect. Monocultures are inherently unstable, susceptible to crashes whenever a single parasite or disease shows up. It's not the first time we've seen crashes in a single monoculture crop, and it won't be the last.
If we want a reliable honey crop, we can't do it like we have been. We need a variety of bees, preferably of several species, so that a single disease or parasite can't wipe out the entire crop, and so that populations can be kept somewhat separate to impair the disease/parasite's rapid spread. But there's no sign that our agricultural system is learning that lesson.
There's no obvious tie-in of this with the climate change phenomenon. Nobody is suggesting that the honeybee die-off has anything to do with the warmer weather.
But the warming will allow the Africanized "killer" bees to expand farther into North America. They are good honey producers; maybe we need to learn to cultivate them. That's why people were experimenting with them South America, after all, when the big "Oops!!" happened and a bunch of them escaped.
Well, if this strategy weren't the most successful, then the long-term-thinking companies would win out in the end, no? Capitalism won't allow an inefficient system to survive in a competitive marketplace.
Actually, there's a simple "disproof of concept" available in the natural world, where people have often tried to make the same argument in favor of efficiency, only to be shot down by the copious evidence that the species that survive are very clearly not the most efficient ones.
Thus, a standard textbook example is that mice occupy a niche very similar to several salamander species. A mouse needs around 10 times the food supply as a similar-sized salamander, due to the energy cost of the mouse's constant high body temperature. But in most environments, mice are the evolutionary winners. Why? Well, when temperatures are low and the cold-blooded salamanders are too sluggish to move fast, the mice come burrowing through the snow and eat them.
The problem with the obvious (but fallacious) logic is that it doesn't much matter how efficient you are when facing a predator. If you don't have the quickly-available power to escape or fight off the predator, you die. It doesn't matter how effient you were; you become food for the competitor that can "waste" a burst of resources to kill you. As long as your body contains more energy than a predator needs to find and kill you, the predator has the evolutionary advantage.
This applies just as well to companies as it does to animals. Thus, a legal department is a huge, unproductive waste of resources. But if you don't "waste" your resources on it, your company dies a horrible death at the hands of the predators that can attack you with a flock of lawyers.
Survival depends on many things, and efficiency is only a part of the equation.
Five GB per month should be enough for anybody.
;-]
[Sorry; I was just amazed that nobody seems to have said this yet.